The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released clear instructions and a compelling argument for deleting your Google search history before the new, comprehensive Google Privacy Policy goes into effect on March 1, 2012. The concern with the new, unified privacy policy is that your web search history will be combined with your data on YouTube, Google Plus, Gmail, Google Docs and all other Google properties, as well as saving it as a permanent history. Removing your search history won’t stop Google from using your data for internal purposes, but it will keep different Google properties from using your search history for marketing and customization purposes.

The instructions are simple. When logged in to your Google account, go to http://www.google.com/history and click the “remove all history” button, confirming it on the next page. That’s it. That will remove your search history and keep your history from being recorded in the future. It is also important that you do this for all of your Google accounts and for some of us, that might quite a task.